A week in my life (outside the classroom)

12/31/2023

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Happy New Year!

This post serves as my reflections on 2023 and wishes for the upcoming year.
I hope 2024 brings you opportunities, challenges, self-discoveries, adventures, and revelations!

This school year is dedicated to nurturing hobbies, loved ones, and old pastimes. I aspire to fill everyday with small gestures and adventures that fire up my vivacious spirit. A flexible schedule offers copious opportunities for investigation and discovery. Over the past few months, I established new routines while budgeting time for social connection. I hope that this precious time away from a 9-to-5 serves as a foundation for a healthy, balanced personal life.

Regardless of my unpredictable work schedule, I am always busy. And I thrive off of the autonomy of choosing the chaos, the job, and the mornings when I wake up after the sun rises. Finally, I feel in control of my time, my most valuable commodity, and how to delegate it. My empty mornings, afternoons, evenings, days –depending on the week’s schedule– are reserved for cultivating relationships.

Presence and communication are skills I seek in others and foster in myself. The hours of sharing space with another are fleeting opportunities to listen, to learn, to laugh, to love. These conversations are a breath of fresh air; they bring me back home, away from the distractions, worries, and lingering stress of work. There is joy in the effortless exchanges: when the two, three, four, etc. of us are the only ones that stay still in the blurry passage of time. And even when there is nothing to say, there is no awkwardness, only stillness. I prioritize people who practice being still; their presence reminds me to slow down, focus on the now, and block out outside force of schedules and the noise of comparison.

Sharing time and space with others is a learned skill. It is easy to default to a movie night or a coffee shop date (although these are always gratifying activities). Over the past few months, I have tried to expand my preconceptions of “quality time” by engaging in mutual hobbies or exposing myself to new environments.

Prime examples of this commitment are routine hikes, runs, or walks outdoors with my inner circle. I strive to be outside everyday, especially in the cooler months, to allow the fresh lakeside air to fill me up and clean out the stress of lingering air from stuffy or restricting rooms. Walking with others who share my admiration of and comfort in the outdoors is soothing and reinvigorating. Whether we catch up or gossip about life’s most recent developments or huff and puff up the slopes in Bagley Nature Center, we are together, away from everything else. It is glorious.

Music is my method to reset, to remember, and to rest when I am alone. I am desperate to build onto my limited library of pop, indie, and folk but also to remember songs I cherished in the past. Therefore, I asked loved ones to participate in a musical exchange: to share playlists, favorite albums, songs to scream in the car, etc. to absorb into my own collections.

Through this exploration, my playlists are littered with Peach Pit, Carole King, Bon Iver, and Billy Joel. When I seek introspection and nostalgia, I scroll through a newly constructed library featuring the best of The Beatles, Beach Boys, and Bruce Springsteen, Joanie Mitchell –my dad’s rotating artists on long car rides– along with radio hits from the 2000s and 2010s (thanks, Vanessa!). I can return to my roots or jump down an unexpected rabbit hole by simply pressing play.

Instrumental and indie music are my companions when investing in outside writing projects. To dissociate from the outside world of clashing noise, I must find a quiet space in a coffee shop, put in my AirPods, and choose between Loving’s “If I Am Only My Thoughts” or a soothing instrumental playlist. I first established this strategic disengagement my junior year of college; every Sunday, I went to the same café, dissociated, and dedicated three hours towards my capstone research project. So now, whenever I am in a writing funk (like now), I rely on this strategy to get out of my head and into a writing space.

As I transition into the new year, I will set goals to maintain these routines and boundaries to nurture my mental health, wellbeing, and identity. When transitioning away from Duluth, back home to the Twin Cities, and then away to Uruguay, it will be easy to lose myself in the constant changes and relocations. Therefore, I will surround myself with people who will bring me back home (to myself), activities to cleanse my mind, and daily practices to build autonomy in an unpredictable year ahead.

I will give myself grace and patience this year. When I slip up, begin to feel FOMO (fear of missing out), miss a routine, or make a mistake, I will pause, breathe, and reflect. “Why am I being so hard on myself?” Answers could include productivity and capitalist culture, perfectionism, pressure to be “nice” and people please instead of setting boundaries. The new year will be one of healing, growth, and nurture. With that being said, I hope 2024 brings you opportunities, challenges, self-discoveries, adventures, and revelations!

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